Congratulations to the winners of the Editors' Prize for Emerging Poets. Out of each issue, the editors select poets who show exceptional promise. The recipients of the Editor's Prize for the issue 33.2 are Jono Tosch, George David Clark, and Stephanie Horvath

BalladJono Tosch

I ate a shrimp for lunch.
The shrimp did not eat me.
For dinner I boiled a squid.
The squid did not boil me.

And then I went to bed
And dreamed of a big pot.
I dreamed of a giant pot
With a giant dumpling in it.

The dumpling called to me,
It said come and find me.
And I called to the dumpling,
Should I bring my hatchet?

The dumpling said to hurry.
I grabbed the only tool I could find.
I grabbed my ball peen hammer
And I hurried out the door.

I found an old love note.
It had grown into an oak.
I put my hand into the hollow
And there I removed your memory.

ProdigaliaGeorge David Clark

When I first furnished my suite in the city
I had a cashmere hammock
hung between the tusks of a tremendous elephant
whose bust was mounted on the bedroom wall.
In that prodigious net young ladies
from the delta used to tumble like rabbits.
I could feel their hearts, like rabbits’ hearts,
beating through their chests,
and imagine, with some encouragement,
that I was God.

And there was too the elephant himself:
the leather blankets of his ears
that I’d detach to draw around my shoulders
while I slept; the hidden compartment
in his trunk where I kept a meerschaum pipe
and petty cash; the eye marbles—color of the lowest
gas flames—through which he glowered at me
his great suspicion, and, now and then,
flashed forth a look of obliterating tenderness
not unlike a father’s.

victim of rabid beaver tires of brush with fameStephanie Horvath

it has been good, dear friends, but enough
is enough

because i had just turned twenty-seven
that morning sometime after 8am i was
responsible
forgive deserters

for parents’ deeds

this room is ugly i live
in memory

because fewer men
driving their cars
had hailed me

because passing by
became un-sex-like

because i was broke

because an afternoon nap

i needed money

because i was broken

because i became the biggest fan of being born drop me
from the sky

because recently an elderly woman
was also attacked by a rabid beaver
like i when climbing out of the lake
where she’d swam everyday

for the last fifty

years because rabies is a thing you can survive

i can say safely

i grow and i also divide

farming is abandoned & gives way to early succession fields

because wetland is allowed to restore itself

more than once i have seen my mother’s cesarean scar
from outside in the light